Economics

In-depth articles on economics exploring key policies in healthcare economics, agriculture subsidies, trade tariffs, government subsidies, and monetary systems — with critical examination of their broader impacts on public health, individual liberty, free markets, economic freedom, and the urgent need for policy reform.

Brownstone Institute provides alternative perspectives on how economic interventions affect society, from farm subsidies distorting food systems and health outcomes to monetary policy enabling control, tariff effects on global trade and liberty, and pathways to restore free-market principles and personal freedoms.

All economics articles are translated into multiple languages to support global readers, open international dialogue, and promote evidence-based reform worldwide.

Corporatism

A Genealogy of Corporatism

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Corporatism abolishes the competitive dynamic of competitive capitalism and replaces it with cartels run by oligarchs. It reduces growth and prosperity. It is invariably corrupt. It promises efficiency but yields only graft. It expands the gaps between rich and poor and creates and entrenches deep fissures between the rulers and ruled. It dispenses with localism, religious particularism, rights of families, and aesthetic traditionalism. It also ends in violence.

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stakeholder capitalism

Stakeholder Capitalism is an Oxymoron

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Stakeholder capitalism inevitably creates a tyranny of minorities, and especially highly ideological minorities (because a shared ideology reduces the cost of organizing). Minority stakeholders will succeed in expropriating majority ones. Minority tyranny is the big problem with democratic politics. Extending it to vast swathes of economic life is a nightmare. 

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threats to liberty

Twenty Grim Realities Unearthed by Lockdowns 

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If you haven’t changed your thinking over the last three years, you are a prophet, indifferent, or asleep. Much has been revealed and much has changed. To meet these challenges, we must do so with our eyes wide open. The greatest threats to human liberty today are not the ones of the past and they elude easy ideological categorization. Further, we have to admit that in many ways the plain human desire to live a fulfilling life in freedom has been subverted. If we want our freedoms back, we need to have a full understanding of the frightening challenges before us. 

Twenty Grim Realities Unearthed by Lockdowns  Read Journal Article

economic thinking

The Economics of Lockdown Panics

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Economics alone cannot tell us if any cost is too much to “save one life.” But economic thinking can help us understand that preserving human life entails bearing costs. It requires resources and people with skills. We must provide ourselves with the means to bear those costs if we wish to continue to have the ability to preserve human life in the future. 

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industrial cartel

How Lockdowns Bolstered an Industrial Cartel

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The introduction of digital commerce in the late 20th century threatened a new age of commercial freedom that came to a screeching halt with the lockdowns of 2020. In this sense, lockdowns were not “progressive” at all but profoundly conservative in the old-fashioned sense of the term. It was an establishment fighting to preserve and entrench its power. Perhaps that was the whole point all along. 

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jobs for teens

The Best Life Lesson for a Teen Is a Job 

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During the Covid debacle, kids were locked out of school or otherwise condemned to an inferior Zoom education for up to two years. What were the alternatives? Unfortunately, since the New Deal, the federal government has severely restricted teenagers’ opportunities for gainful employment. But new evidence proves that keeping kids out of work doesn’t keep them out of mental health trouble. 

The Best Life Lesson for a Teen Is a Job  Read Journal Article

Economic Cost

Why Economic Cost Was So Seriously Neglected

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Economic illiteracy is an important part of the explanation of why there was such broad acceptance of the pandemic policies. And also why there was very limited skepticism among common people. Had they understood economic reasoning, they would have been inoculated (if you excuse the pun) against being deceived by experts. They would have been able to see through the promises and would have asked the necessary questions.

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inflation

The Battle Against Inflation Is Nowhere Near Won

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In a word, American fiscal governance is broken and broken badly. Owing to the Fed’s massive monetization of the public debt over last several years Washington has lost all sense of the economic costs and consequences of massive borrowing. And that’s because there has been no “crowding out” and no spiraling interest rate signals from the bond pits of the type which historically kept Washington pols close to the fiscal straight and narrow.

The Battle Against Inflation Is Nowhere Near Won Read Journal Article

BioNTech’s 30 Billion Reasons

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The real winner in the Covid-19 vaccine sweepstakes is the German company BioNTech, not Pfizer. BioNTech made over $31 billion in Covid-19 vaccine profits on a 77 percent profit margin as compared to Pfizer’s just over $20 billion on the estimated 27.5 percent profit margin. So, BioNTech made 50 percent more profits on a nearly three times higher profit margin.

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essential and nonessential

What They Meant by Essential and Nonessential

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Think of totalitarian societies like in The Hunger Games, with a District One and everyone else, or perhaps the old Soviet Union in which the party elites dined in luxury and everyone else stood in bread lines, or perhaps a scene from Oliver! in which the owners of the orphanage got fat while the kids in the workhouse lived on gruel until they could escape to live in the underground economy. It appears that the pandemic planners think of society the same way.

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